Trek Movie Report and Aint it cool news had announced last year that it was Khan after hearing the news from reliable sources.

Unnamed sources. And such early claims from "reliable sources" have been wrong many times in the past. Hearsay is not evidence and not worth wasting time with. It's just something the media sites use to fill space with when they don't have any actual news to report. Which is why it's so important not to confuse rumor with news. Journalistic standards in the Internet age have degenerated so badly that it's incumbent on the individual to read defensively and be very careful about what claims one takes seriously.

Of course IT'S STILL RUMOR but there is nothing yet that proves that it isn't Khan.

Again, that's getting the burden of proof entirely backwards. There's nothing that proves there isn't an invisible pink elephant levitating behind me right now, but that doesn't mean it would be rational of me to believe there was.

And I've seen the clip where Alice Eve says "It's not Khan," and it's completely off the cuff and unthinking. There's no sign she's being calculating or careful to throw people off. In fact, I think if she'd stopped to think about it, she wouldn't have said anything, because even a denial is giving away too many specifics by Abrams's standards. (I think Pegg got in a bit of trouble by making the same denial months earlier.) She just blurted it out absently in the context of an awards-show interview that was mainly about other stuff. Unless she's spent weeks practicing for that situation so that she could lie unthinkingly, I'd say she was telling the truth. And you'd have to be really paranoid to think she'd go to those lengths to deceive rather than just saying nothing.

Or if you would like to take the word of Simon Pegg who played a game and convinced his twitter followers one time that he might be dead then go ahead and take it at face value.

As I've said, it's not about a single piece of evidence. No single assertion is reliable regardless of the source, which is why corroboration is essential. At this point, we have several corroborating pieces of relatively strong evidence pointing away from the Khan speculations. We have nothing but hearsay and rumor in the other direction. If some real evidence comes along pointing to Khan, of course I'll reassess the probabilities, because that's what a sensible person does. It's not about beliefs or hopes or deceptive things like that; it's about estimating probabilities based on the evidence. Of course probabilities can shift as new evidence comes along, but there's no sense in pre-emptively expecting the probabilities to go against the evidence. It could be that John Harrison is a disguised Khan, but that is far from the most likely scenario at this point.

Anyway, it's a silly thing to waste time arguing over, because the movie will be out within three months and then we'll actually know.

__________________Christopher L. Bennett Homepage -- Site update 11/16/14 including annotations for "The Caress of a Butterfly's Wing" and overview for DTI: The Collectors